GHSA-x2xw-hw8g-6773

    Dashboard / Vulnerabilities / GHSA-x2xw-hw8g-6773

    GHSA-x2xw-hw8g-6773

    Published: 11 Apr 2023Last Modified: 8 Jul 2026

    Summary: govuk_tech_docs vulnerable to unescaped HTML on search results page

    Details: ### Impact Pages that are indexed in search results have their entire contents indexed, including any HTML code snippets. These HTML snippets would appear in the search results unsanitised, so it was possible to render arbitrary HTML or run arbitrary scripts. This is a low risk security issue; to exploit it, an attacker would need to find a way of committing malicious code to a page indexed by a site that uses tech-docs-gem (which are typically not editable by untrusted users). Their code would also be limited by the relatively short length that's rendered in the corresponding search result. Nevertheless, the XSS would then be triggerable by visiting a pre-constructed URL (/search/index.html?q=some+search+term), which users could be tricked into clicking on through social engineering. ### Patches This has been fixed in v3.3.1. HTML is now sanitised in search results.

    Affected packages

    Package

    Name: govuk_tech_docs

    Purl: pkg:gem/govuk_tech_docs

    Affected ranges

    Type: ECOSYSTEM

    Events:

    Introduced- 2.0.2
    Fixed -3.3.1

    Affected versions

    2.0.10
    2.0.11
    2.0.12
    2.0.13
    2.0.2
    2.0.3
    2.0.4
    2.0.5
    2.0.6
    2.0.7
    2.0.8
    2.0.9

    Common Vulnerability Scoring System

    Attack Vector
    Network
    Adjacent
    Local
    Physical
    Privileges Required
    None
    Low
    High
    User Interaction
    None
    Required
    Scope
    Unchanged
    Changed
    Confidentiality
    None
    Low
    High
    Integrity
    None
    Low
    High
    Availability
    None
    Low
    High